{"entity":{"id":"mechanism-of-action-recovery","kind":"term","name":"Mechanism-of-action recovery and known-biology probes","aka":["mechanism-of-action recovery","MoA recovery","recovers known biology","known-biology probe","known-biology probes","biological sanity check","responder versus non-responder biomarker"],"tldr":"A model that claims to have learned biology should, without being told, point at the known mechanism of a known drug or the known marker of a known cell type; recovering such known biology is an orthogonal check that a correlation is not an artefact.","summary":"A drug's mechanism of action is the specific biochemical interaction through which it produces its effect, usually naming its molecular target (Wikipedia). For a drug-response or perturbation model, ranking the MEK pathway genes first for a MEK inhibitor, or HER2 and its amplicon for trastuzumab, is a probe that costs nothing and catches models that learned tissue or batch instead. The same logic underlies tertiary lymphoid structures as a probe for spatial models and responder-versus-non-responder framing as the application that matters.","asOf":"2026-09-24","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_action","links":[{"label":"Wikipedia","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_action"}],"tags":["cansim-terms"],"related":["cancer-ai-vocabulary"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":["ras-mapk"],"terms":["virtual-cell-models","tertiary-lymphoid-structures","ablation-study"],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":["Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/moa-recovery."],"provenance":{"editedBy":"OnCo CanSim terms wave (Wikipedia summaries, standards and project pages, GDC and FDA pages, Europe PMC)","editedOn":"2026-09-24","note":"CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme"},"category":"Methods and models"},"route":"/terms/mechanism-of-action-recovery/","neighbours":{"term":[{"id":"ablation-study","kind":"term","name":"Ablation study and multi-task heads","route":"/terms/ablation-study/"},{"id":"cancer-ai-vocabulary","kind":"term","name":"Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)","route":"/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/"},{"id":"tertiary-lymphoid-structures","kind":"term","name":"Tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS)","route":"/terms/tertiary-lymphoid-structures/"},{"id":"virtual-cell-models","kind":"term","name":"Virtual cell models and in-silico perturbation screens","route":"/terms/virtual-cell-models/"}],"pathway":[{"id":"ras-mapk","kind":"pathway","name":"RAS / RAF / MEK / ERK (MAPK)","route":"/pathways/ras-mapk/"}]}}